Ann-Marie's an elephant, a-playin' in the band / Won't you take a ride on a flyin' spool . . .
The mind reels. Only I'm pretty certain that's not what Fogerty is singing.
Like dozens, maybe hundreds of pop songs I've been singing along with, I know I'm mangling those lines, and have - can it be? - for decades.
Back when, the only way to puzzle out a misunderstood lyric was to buy the album and check the lyric sheet or liner notes.
For more than a decade, it's been easy and free.
Tap a few keystrokes into one of the many lyric sites on the Internet, and the words become as clear as sheet music.
But really, why would anyone want to do that? Why would anyone bother to tamper with one's golden, screwed-up, misheard lyrics? Why bother with fastidious exactitude now.
Music is personal. You never lose the songs that seeped into your head at a certain age.
They are forever linked to a time, a place, experiences.
The associations are vivid: whom you knew, whom you hated, whom you had a crush on. Clothes, food, smells all come rushing back.
If you correct what you thought you heard, you pull on the thread of memory, disturbing the entire fabric.
You are, on some level, what you mishear.
When I hear Beast of Burden, in my mind, it's the summer, and I'm a teenager painting houses again.
As the strokes go back and forth in the heat, Mick and I sing the bridge part together: Yeah, all your sisters, I can suck a duck . . .
Never understood that line. And I know it isn't right. And I don't care.
Or maybe I'm driving down the coast highway in my first car, to my first real job.
It's 6 in the morning (early shift), and I push the cassette into the dashboard.
And that staccato bass starts to come up with the sun.
And the Knack guy sings - or so I thought then and now - Is it just a matter of time, Sharona? / Is it just a debt to be, a debt to me / Or is it just in my mind, Sharona?
It doesn't quite make sense. And yet it's perfect.
On the few occasions when I've checked, a song's actual lyrics turn out to be less interesting that my mistaken understanding of them.
Bob Seger is actually singing, Call me a relic, call me what you will on Old Time Rock & Roll.
But I prefer my misinterpretation: Call me a rabbit, call me what you will . . .
The apparent name for this phenomenon is mondegreen, a word coined by writer Sylvia Wright in the 1950s to describe her childhood misreading of an old Scottish folk song that referred, or so she thought, to "Lady Mondegreen."
Instead, the song described the slaying of a noble and the townspeople who laid him on the green.
The all-time greatest mondegreen may be Louie, Louie. I refer here to the 1963 hit by the Kingsmen.
When the song came out, some parents thought lead singer Jack Ely's slurring of the lyrics masked indecent or obscene statements.
The resultant uproar led to a federal investigation.
Louie is actually a sweet story of a homesick sailor who longs to return to his girlfriend (A fine girl, she wait for me / Me catch the ship across the sea . . .).
I'd argue that Benny and the Jets is a close second to Louie in the mondegreen sweepstakes.
Elton John's 1973 hit is so incomprehensibly sung that only a few of its lyrics (B-b-b-b-Benny and the Jets!) are actually understandable without liner notes or sensitive sonic equipment some 35 years after the fact.
I am pleased to report that this song is still mystifying people, as evidenced by a brief scene in the recent movie 27 Dresses, in which the characters argue over the lyrics.
Anyway, here, is what I think I'm hearing:Oh, it's a-weird and s'wonderful/I'll fancy the ready cane/ She's gotta let me move/I know how, too . . ./You know I read a little pack of 'zines.
I'll grant you that Elton's actual lyrics are probably better than my own. But that doesn't matter to me.
My understanding of Benny is locked in adolescence and hasn't grown at all over the years.
I'm very proud of that.
I mean, finding the real lyrics now would be like finding that some other long-cherished artifice of memory wasn't strictly true, as if your dad wasn't really that strong or your first girlfriend, really, wasn't all that pretty.
All this may be literally true. But that's the problem with the literal truth: It has very little poetry.
And it sure as heck ain't got no soul. - Paul Farhi
